Heroic Verse

Summary

IT IS A VALID ASSUMPTION that there must have been in and before the Old High German period a tradition of orally transmitted heroic poetry associated with the warrior aristocracy and consisting of tales of kings, warriors and heroes, a poetry of action and conflict, set within a particular class of society, and comparable with early poetry in many other cultures. Having oral roots, poetry of this kind — usually known as oral-formulaic poetry — would use the kind of poetic formulas that are found in writings as old as the Homeric epics, set phrases that fit into the established meter, a technique probably most familiar from the English ballad, where a line like “come saddle me my milk-white steed” serves regularly as a metrically convenient, but not otherwise significant indicator that someone is about to set off somewhere. The use of set formulas allows the oral poet to construct the action or dialogue of a work — these are main features — on the skeleton of metrically suitable lines. Poetry of this kind, in the vernacular, on themes of heroic behavior, can be found in virtually every culture, both at epic length and in shorter form, and the fact that examples survive in Old English and especially in Old Norse makes it likely that there was similar material in High German. We know too that Charlemagne was interested in such songs and may have collected them, but his successors and the Church disapproved of secular works and also controlled the means of writing, so that in German they were simply not committed to script.